In Their Own Words

Contains 35 poems divided into three sections: Love Poems, Philosophical Poems, and Poems Comical and Satirical. Some of the Philosophical Poems, and the Poems Comical and Satirical were written while I was a grad student in physics at Chicago. Those were the days when we heard in Ida Noyes Hall such famous poets as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. I sent an early version of this book of poems to Poetry, then edited by Karl Shapiro, who gave me some helpful hints in reply. Three of the Love Poems were written while I was an undergraduate at Harvard, two of them being translations from Heine and Brentano. Then, a couple were written while I was a Ph.D. student in physics at Stanford. The remainder were written while I was teaching physics at Holy Cross, and some after my retirement in 1994, here in San Diego. I submitted various versions of the book to contests without success, so in 2004, after turning 80, I said, Why not pay them have them published yourself, before it is too late? To borrow from Housman: "None of my three score years and ten/None of them will come again/And take from seventy springs, four score/It hardly leaves me many more. So to hell with contests I have said,/I'll publish them now before I'm dead." And so I did.